Most Impactful books/articles

1. Jim Scott’s Seeing like a State – Unlearning my (Singaporean) desire for order through exposing the politics of order and modern development
2. Frantz Fanon’s Black Skins White Masks – On how what we hate about others reveals about ourselves (through a psychoanalysis of race-construction)
3. W.E.B. Du Bois’ Souls of Black Folk – For narrating the lived emotional experience of seeing oneself through another’s eyes
4. Sara Ahmed’s Cultural Politics of Emotions – Personal favorite theory of emotions, and my introduction to psychoanalysis
5. Faisal Devji’s The Terrorist in Search of Humanity – On how humanitarians (and terrorists) construct an abstract “humanity”
6. John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory – On how secular social theory is religious
7. PTJ’s The Conduct of Inquiry in IR – My introduction to epistemology, and giving me the tools to fight back against positivism
8. PT Jackson and Dan Nexon’s Relations before States – Reconciling what I loved about (non-postivist) microeconomic theory
9. Carol Cohen’s Sex and Death – For her feminist ethnography of defence experts, and for breaking the fourth wall in academic writing
10. Andrea Cornwall and Karen Brock’s What do Buzzwords do for Development Policy –
11. Chen Kuan Hsing’s Asia as Method – On how (and how not) to decolonize knowledge

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~ by moz on March 19, 2016.